“A couple of months. I needed a break after everything.”
“After me, you mean?”Shit. That question—a clumsymisfire into an uneasy truce—could renew hostilities if he decided to take it the wrong way.
“Not just you.” His tone was flat, revealing nothing. He got up abruptly. “Come on, I’m hungry. You must be too. I’ll reheat the leftover lasagna.”
“Do I have time to change?” she asked, peering down at her black leggings and gray tank top. She’d been in these since six this morning and it was now nearly seven.
“Shower too if you’d like.”
He got up and offered an arm for support. With the cumbersome boot, she had no choice but to take the assistance and she gripped the proffered arm tentatively.
She tried hard to ignore the heat, hardness, and strength of that arm, but failed miserably as her hand curled around his forearm.
If this were another time, when they’d been different versions of themselves, she would have wound her arm through his and leaned against him. But it wasn’t and Kenny was honest enough with herself to admit that she’dneverbeen comfortable enough in her own skin to be that carefree or fearless.
She wished that there was some way of unlocking that McKenna, but she’d been ruthlessly suppressed and imprisoned in an airless, dark box, buried too deep to ever find her way back to the light.
Chapter
Nine
“Come on, man,”Smith muttered in disgust when he saw Kenny after her shower half an hour later. His eyes were fulminating as he raked them over her body. “I’ve been looking for that T-shirt for months!”
She was wearing a loose pair of shorts—one of her own this time—and a whiteThe SmithsT-shirt.
“Oh.” Kenny hooked her thumbs in the bottom corners of the fabric and stretched out the front to look down at the image of the band. She’d just grabbed the closest clean T-shirt without really paying attention to what was on it.
“God, don’t stretch it out like that, for fuck’s sake,” Smith protested. “It’s vintage!”
“Do you like this group?” Kenny asked curiously as she limped to the kitchen table and sat down. “I never really heard of them before finding the shirt mixed in with my laundry one day.”
“And what? You decided it was a finders keepers kind of situation?” He looked and sounded peevish. He stood by the stove, hair standing up in tufts, with one of those all toofamiliar glares on his face.
It was becoming his default expression.
“It’s comfortable.”
“It’s blatant theft. The damned thing has my name on it and you still decided to keep it! Who does that?”
“It doesn’t haveyourname on it.”
“Close enough.”
“Wait, is that the only reason you like this shirt? Because the bandkind ofhas your name? Not because of their music, or their politics, or their?—”
“I like their music well enough,” he interrupted sharply, but he looked shifty as he said it.
“Oh, you’re so lying!” she accused, pointing a finger at him. “You totally got thisvintageand probably expensive T-shirt because of the name.” Which was actually more than a little endearing. And would’ve been funny, if he wasn’t being such a dick about it right now.
“It doesn’t matter why I got it,” he insisted, a stubborn set to his jaw. “The fact is that it’s mine and you stole it.”
“Oh my God, you’re being such a child about this. You know you’re being really petty, right?”
She pushed herself up and out of the chair and awkwardly rounded the table until she was just a couple of feet away from him. Before she could think it through, she dragged his precious T-shirt up and off in one fluid movement, then rudely tossed it in his face.
He didn’t catch it.
Instead, the T-shirt slid down his body and draped over his bare feet, while he stood frozen and gaped at her chest.
